What the Fuck? Michael Jackson is dead.

Alright, this is depressing as fuck.

I first heard the news as a rumor between two cats outside the corner store about 4 hours ago on my way downtown.

“Yo, you heard Michael Jackson died?”

“Naw, man I heard that was just a rumor.”

A small lump in my stomach started to throb. The kind you get when you realize something’s gone irreversibly wrong and there’s nothing you can do about it.

As I kept walking the sounds of “Thriller,” “Billie Jean” and “Beat It,” blasting from nearly every car that passed confirmed it and by this time the lump had blossomed into a full blown sadness. What the Fuck? Michael Jackson is dead?

For a minute I felt like pulling an old-black-moms-at-her-son’s-funeral and break down right at the corner of 17th and Telegraph. What the Fuck? Michael Jackson is dead?!

Filed under: Art, Music , Billie Jean, jimmie Hendricks George Clinton, Michael Jackson, prince, RIP, Thriller

Red Clay and Bukowski are better artists than you

If you don’t have to make art, don’t.  This shit is difficult and the hourly pay sucks.

I remember when I was in college one of my poetry profs would regularly deliver the one two reality punch of encouraging students  to write as much as possible, right before stressing that you should only make it a career if you had no choice.   The ones that had no choice knew who they were.  We were the ones with that far off look in our eyes and wandering gaze, the ones who walked into class on clouds and talked sestinas and sentence structure till 3 in the morning clutching a jug of wine and chain smoking hand rolled cigarrettes.  We’re all broke now.

But of course, it’s what we do.  No regrets over here.  Especially when you run across a work that changes the way you look at life, offers a new vantage point, or gives you hope regarldless of the stupid shit that happens on the day to day.  There’s that old saying that “hearts speak to each other” and while I’m not ready to get on The Secret Metaphysical, I do believe that you can spot a true artist a mile away, someone who does it because they have to, cuz there is no other option.  Who, even if they were down to their last dime, dumpster diving they’d find a top to bang on, a pencil to write with or a song to sing.

Filed under: Art, Hip Hop, Music, Poetry , Art, Charles Bukowski, Hip Hop, Music, Poetry, Red Clay

Tehran poems, open sex and the freedom to move

A poem on Tehran’s streets:

This is one of the most moving things I’ve read in a minute.  It’s been making the internet rounds since last weekend went things in Iran went Ballistic.

While everyone I know has been stunned silent by the Neda video, to me this young woman’s words are just as moving.

In that respect, here are a few more pieces that take an unexpected sidedoor into the revolutionary ideology.  Nothing’s loud or obvious, just enough to challenge conceptions.

Read more. 

Filed under: Activism, Poetry

It’s Tricia. Dr. Rose If You’re Nasty

My god I think I love this woman.

I read Dr. Tricia Rose’s first book, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, a couple years out of high school and it was one of the first pieces of critical text to really make the hard connections between Hip Hop, black inner city culture, technology and social justice.

Judging from this video , recorded at the Columbia College a few months back, it looks like Dr. Rose is still dropping jewels on the sometimes staid halls of academia.  Here she discusses the idea of a post racial America in the time of President B-Rock.

Props to The Black Report for the link.

Filed under: Activism, Authors, Books, Hip Hop, Politics

Martin Luther: “Home” live

“You see my neighborhood’s already been gentrified

SinFrinpsycho killafornia was my home…”

The funky man name after a monk kills this live perfomance.  I’ve heard this song  a lot and I have no idea how I missed the lines above.  But given the city by the Bay’s current state of mass exodus, it’s an apt statement.

Filed under: Uncategorized , Martin Luther, San Francisco, Video

A poem a day…

Three Oddest Words

When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.

When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no nonbeing can hold.

-Wislawa Szymborska

Yes, I admit it. I’m a poet, and there doesn’t seem to be a cure for it.

As long as I can remember it’s been there-an insane fascination with words, how they can mean and the hidden truths that poetry can uncover. And while I know this will piss some people off I still maintain that poetry is the purest form of writing.

Sonia Sanchez reads at the New Jersey Public Library

Regardless of the form, style or lack thereof, poetry can act as a vehicle for self and social observation in ways not commonly found in fiction, essays or journalism.

Poetry has the ability to mine deep down to the really dirty shit. Those ideas and feelings that might not make make it into everyday conversations, but make up the basis of who we are as individuals and as a culture. Idealistic? Probably. But doesn’t the best art spring from larger than life ideas?

So in addition to the tech, culture, and all the randoms posts that have and will be showing up in this space, I’ll be making a more conscious effort to include more poems, video and audio, poetry news, collaborations and criticism. I’ve started posting daily poems over on my Twitter feed and will be archiving them here. Here’s the first set. If you have any recommendations or suggestion shoot me a message.

Filed under: Poetry , Poems, Poetry

Weekly Link Orgy

Intellectual Viagra. The links and info that gave my brain an erection this week. (Umm..)

Filed under: Uncategorized

Ursula Rucker as alternative to bad poetry

So earlier this week, in a bit of creative hissy fit over all the marketing and journalism work I’ve been doing lately and the great but oh-so-business-focused Tweets I’ve been recieving, I decided to send out a poem a day, 5 days a week, to add a little verse into these heavy tech and business conversations.

So far there’s been this great piece from Martin Espada, a poem from Kevin Young’s brilliant “To Repel Ghosts” a collection insired by the paintings of Jean Michel Basquiat, and this spoken word/house anthem below, from 4Hero and Ursula Rucker.  This came out a while back and was one of the 1st pieces that I thought “got it right” when it came to blending beats and spoken word w/o sounding corny as hell.  

Filed under: Music, Poetry

Tonight in San Francisco-Hybrid Journalism!

The new grassroots journalism

Not so breaking news! The news industry is getting turned on it’s ear. Not so secret tip: No one really knows what to do about it! Over the last couple of years, as longtime newspaper folk have been shown the door en masse, and everyone’s Tweeted and Friended themselves into a public frenzy, a lot of new questions, new challenges and new opportunities have risen from the ashes of all those burned newspapers.

But what does this multimedia real time approach to life mean for the way we report and consume the news? What are the new tools and how are they being used? Find out the insider info from the new news biz at this panel discussion with members of the new and old guard media. Panelest include: Katharine Mieszkowski, Salon.com,Joe Rubin, FRONTLINE/World, Robert Rosenthal, CIR, Kevin Weston, New America Media and Marcus Chan, SF Chronicle and will be moderated by Magnet Media’s Megan Cunningham. 

Filed under: Media , journalism, Media, News, online, San Francisco